demonstrate different visions of the parties on the role of government, rights, and responsibilities of citizens in the sphere of health care
American Health Care Act (AHCA) presented by Trump’s administration and Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) demonstrate different visions of the parties on the role of government, rights, and responsibilities of citizens in the sphere of health care. Whereas ACA is set to achieve a nearly universal access to health care, AHCA strives to limit federal spendings and optimize the resource usage. The failure of the first version of AHCA was attributed to the alleged jeopardy, in which it would have put the insurance system in the U.S. One of the main reasons was substantial limitations proposed for ACA including less federal financing and extended privileges of states for discontinuation of service for those having ACA insurance (Hirsch et al., 2017). In addition, it did not address the major problem concerning all the U.S. states such as the increase in health care costs.
Presently, under ACA the state provides subsidized health insurance for the family of four if its annual income is below 97,000 dollars. Under AHCA that limit was raised to 150,000 (Hirsch et al., 2017). Another difference is that individual insurance that was eventually introduced to ACA was absent in AHCA. In addition to that, ACA ranged subsidies by income level, whereas AHCA initially proposed to substitute them for the age-based system, where the amount of benefit increased with age. The reform proposed by Trump’s administration was set to allocate the 15 billion from the Patient and State Stability Fund to address multiple issues including provision of assistance to high-risk patients, widening access to prevention services, increasing insurance coverage, and so forth (Hirsch et al., 2017).